


fate

by cyrenid



Series: to build a home [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Gen, Time Travel, fiancees are tagged bc they're alluded to but they arent the focal point of story, not proofread im not a coward /lh, other characters mentioned but not plot relevant so im not tagging em, sad but not bad enough to deserve angst tag, time traveller karl and immortal dream make a reappearance babey, time traveller!karl jacobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29013090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyrenid/pseuds/cyrenid
Summary: Dream had fallen silent after that, and the two men stood quietly overlooking a barren lake. Karl noticed a few axolotls swimming in it, and noted that they must have been one of the animals that Dream said had been itching to inhabit this land. Dream muttered something next to Karl. He turned to the quiet man with an eyebrow raised.“We could build a house. Out there. In the- the… in the middle of the lake. I think that’d be nice.”Karl nodded in gentle agreement.“I think that a house would look great there. Only, what would you build it out of?”He saw Dream crack a smile under his mask at that joke, and the two men laughed darkly at themselves.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs/Sapnap, Clay | Dream & Karl Jacobs
Series: to build a home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128422
Comments: 23
Kudos: 217
Collections: Completed stories I've read, Fanfics I’d eat again at 3 am and already have





	fate

**Author's Note:**

> i took one look at time traveller!Karl being canon and i was like "okay but get this- what if he fucked up real bad" and out came this  
> also sidenote this is lightly proofread but i trust my skills enough to know there aren't gonna b any glaring issues but if u see any ignore them /j

Karl sat with the still body of his fiancee in his arms. Sapnap wasn’t dead yet, but Karl knew he would be soon. The body of Quackity, their other partner, was too damaged to be recovered.

Karl lifted his head to the battlefield in front of him. His comrades were dead and dying on the ground; young children, aged gods, and kings alike lay prone on the unforgiving bedrock. Karl suppressed a sob as he made eye contact with Tommy, his pleading expression cemented on his face, Tubbo’s sword in hand. Sam lay nearby, having protected the young boys until his final breath. Red vines curled around Bad’s panting body, and Karl watched as he slowly gave in to the spirit. 

He turned back to his fiancee, softly cupping his face and wiping the tears and blood from it. Sapnap turned and kissed the palm of his hand, drawing another sob out of Karl. The younger man inhaled to speak, but choked on the blood clogging his lungs. Karl shushed him gently, leaning down and pressing a kiss to his forehead.

“You fought well, my love.” Sapnap sighed at this comment. “I’ll never forget you,” Karl continued, “but this.. it was- it was just never.. never meant to be,” he choked out through his tears. Sapnap smiled up at him, and closed his eyes. Karl stayed with him until his hand weakly fell from his grip. 

He had silently placed a daffodil by his partner’s body, then rose again to survey the damage. He couldn’t feel the presence of many souls left, and those he felt were weak, and dying. Technoblade lay bleeding next to Phil, his wings covering both of their dying bodies. Niki was curled into Puffy, the women having found each other again in their last moments. Tubbo, along with Quackity and Jack, had been in the line of fire of Tubbo’s bombs, their items and bodies irrecoverable. 

Karl had caused this. He knew that much. He had spent too much time in the future, had seen this exact event play out hundreds of times. He had _lived_ this event hundreds of times, trying to stop it. He had held a dying Sapnap hundreds of times. He never had the heart to tell Sapnap why he never wanted to marry the both of his fiancees. He knew he would never see a happy ending with them.

Who was it that Technoblade always spoke about, Acrisius? Karl had heard the story so many times, and it hit him like a brick just then. A man so afraid of the prophecy that his grandson would one day kill him that he tried to kill the child himself, tried to avoid a prophecy. His grandson and daughter escaped his wrath, and the child grew up to be a mighty warrior. Acrisius died by accident, at a funeral game, by his grandson’s hand.

Karl had tried to tempt fate, and had caused it anyways. He dropped to his knees once more.

This was normally when Karl would travel back to the present, curl into bed with his fiancees, and try to avoid their questioning as to why he couldn’t look either of them in the eyes. Karl couldn’t go back anymore. He had lived every day up until this moment; it was no longer the future, Karl _was in_ the present that he wanted so desperately to go back to.

A soft buzz sounded on his communicator, making Karl jump. He was certain it was another message signalling one of his friend’s deaths. But as he opened the device, a soft voice sounded out of it.

“Karl?” came Dream’s voice. “Karl is that you? What’s going on?” 

He gasped. Dream had never left the prison. Karl had told Sam of a “bad feeling” in his gut about letting Dream participate in this fight, sure that Dream would be the cause of this destruction. Funnily enough, everyone else had led to their own demise. Perhaps, Karl thought, Dream wasn’t the fuel in the fire on the server.

“Yeah man, it’s me. Hang on, I’m coming to you, alright?”

“Okay.” Dream sounded resigned, and so tired. He had been in the prison for almost half a year, and had received next to no visitors. He had planned an escape attempt, early on, but after it failed and after Sam starved him for weeks, Dream hadn’t tried again.

Karl arrived at the prison, but with no warden there, there was no way to get in. He called Dream again.

“Dream, can you find a way to use your powers and break the cell? I can’t get to you.”

“What? No! Sam will kill me, and I can’t- I don’t want- I just want to be a good-”

“Sam’s dead,” Karl interjected. “They’re all dead, Dream. The pings you’ve gotten are their- the death messages. Please let me in.”

Dream went silent. “Al- They’re all dead? How?”

Karl took a deep breath, which must have been enough of an answer for Dream. Karl heard air rush through the communicator, and a smack as it fell to the ground. Karl could hear the rustling of a piece of paper, or perhaps a book, as Dream muttered to himself. Karl sat down in the warden’s chair that used to belong to Sam, letting Dream take a few minutes to calm down. He placed his communicator on the table, and took to flipping through the visitor’s logs. The last visitor here had been Captain Puffy, over two months ago. Karl knew she had started up a therapy business of sorts, wanting to get through to Dream specifically, to figure out what had turned him into a monster of sorts. Puffy had left the prison red-eyed last time, saying that Dream was “too far gone.” 

Everyone had decided to leave him alone after that.

Karl clicked mute on his communicator, letting Dream have a few more moments of privacy before asking him to let Karl in again. He flipped through more pages of the visitors logs, feeling himself choke up slightly at seeing his friend’s signatures. He ran his thumb lightly over Quackity and Sapnap’s signatures, both of them having visited at the same time—Quackity had said he’d rather die than visit Dream, but Sapnap had begged him to accompany the younger man while he visited his old friend. Sapnap had left with his throat raw from screaming, and he didn’t let go of his fiancees the entire night. Karl had never asked Quackity what happened in the cell. And now he never could.

Karl heard a faint but persistent banging noise from afar, and unmuted his communicator again. Dream was shouting, and throwing something against the walls of his cell. 

“Dream?” Karl interrupted. 

The noise stopped.

“Why aren’t you dead, Karl?”

Karl fell silent. Dream was quiet as well, awaiting an answer from Karl. Though, Karl was sure he already knew the answer.

“I tried to stop it, Dream. I tried so many times— I tried everything. Everyone always died in the end. Everyone always.. Always killed each other. The vines, and the—Tubbo’s bombs— I couldn’t stop it all.”

Dream threw something against the wall again. Karl listened closely, and heard the shattering of glass against the obsidian. He knew Dream had had a clock in the cell, but he assumed it was no longer functioning after that throw.

“Selfish! You’re selfish! You’re just like me Karl! You- you knew too much! You were too selfish to let yourself die with them, so you’re just going to rot away in this empty world, and die, and then-- and then you’ll… you’ll leave me alone…”

Karl heard Dream deflate, his voice drawing closer to the communicator as he lay down on the floor of his cell. 

“Leave, Karl,” Dream said. 

“What? No, I need you to let me I-”

“GET OUT.” Dream screamed back. Karl hurriedly hit mute on his communicator, but he didn’t leave the prison lobby. Dream was the only person Karl had left. He didn’t want to live the rest of his life alone, he at least wanted a companion, someone to pass the time wi-

Oh god. 

Dream was the _only_ person Karl had left. 

Karl sighed and rubbed his eyes. He had never been a skilled fighter, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to survive many nights alone. Karl knew he had to rely on Dream, in whatever state he was in, to protect him from the monsters that rose at night.

His communicator pinged quietly on the table before him. Karl picked it up, ready to reply to Dream’s messages. His eyes widened at the words **_Dream tried to swim in lava_** repeating over and over on the screen. He unmuted himself again.

“Dream?”

Karl heard no response, but he did hear the unmistakable noise of a body burning in lava. His communicator pinged again. Karl heard a faint splashing sound in the background, the noise of Dream being placed once again into his cell. Fast footsteps sounded, and Karl took a chance again.

“Dream!” He shouted. The footsteps stopped. Karl softened his voice, “come on man, you know that’s not going to do anything.”

A suppressed sob sounded through the communicator, and Karl heard rustling as Dream sat next to the communicator. He whispered something to himself that Karl couldn’t hear, and Karl asked him to repeat his words.

“Why won’t I die, Karl?” 

Dream’s resigned, defeated voice pulled at Karl’s heartstrings. Karl may not be immortal in the way Dream was, but he had lived dozens of lifetimes on this server; in theory, he was probably as old as Dream was. Karl too, wished he had perished with his friends. He wished he had had the courage to die with his friends. 

“I think we’re stuck with each other, Dream. I may not understand your magic, but I know you can’t leave this world behind until I’m gone. And I’d rather not sit here with a man trying fruitlessly to kill himself for the next forty years.” 

“If you had died with them this wouldn’t have been a problem,” Dream spit back. 

Sapnap’s content and resigned face appeared in Karl’s mind, and he could have sworn he could still feel Sapnap’s tears on his fingers. Quackity whispered _“I’ll see you when this is over''_ in his ears. 

“I couldn’t let him die alone,” he whispered.

Silence filled the air between them. 

Dream grunted, and Karl heard him stand up. Soon, the sound of blocks breaking at will met Karl’s ears. He had witnessed Dream use his magic before, when accidents had happened on the server, but this time it sounded different. With every block that broke, a gust of air left Dream, as if it pained him to mine them, even using his magic. Karl knew that other magic had been put into effect to keep prisoners from breaking their cell walls and leaving, but he wondered if Dream was subconsciously afraid of leaving his cell, still afraid of Sam. Karl didn’t know what Sam had done to Dream, but he knew Sam had been taken over by the crimson for a very long time. The only reason Dream hadn’t succumbed to it as well was his immortality.

Karl, on the other hand, had lived enough lives to know how to avoid the crimson.

Soon enough, Dream appeared in front of Karl, communicator in hand. He was floating slightly above the blackstone floors, and as he dropped back down, his knees gave out and he collapsed under his own weight. Karl reached out to catch him, but he missed him, and Dream fell to the floor anyways. Karl began checking him on the ground for injuries, until Dream stopped his inspections with his words.

“I’m fine, Karl. I’m just— I think I’m just tired.”

Karl scooted back and looked at Dream. He hadn’t seen him in months, as he was too afraid of Dream exploiting his time travelling capabilities to escape in some way. Logically, he knew Dream most likely knew what was going to happen to his friends in the end as well, but Karl still lived in fear of being outed by Dream for his future sight. 

Dream was skinnier now, much skinnier than he had been when Karl saw him last. His mask was nowhere in sight, and Karl had a full view of his gaunt face. He almost looked away from his face, out of respect for the masked man’s privacy, but figured that formalities didn’t matter anymore. Dream had purple shadows under his eyes, and they were devoid of the mischievous air that used to light them up. His lips were dry and chapped, as if he hadn’t had water in days. His nose was turned at a strange angle, a sign of it having been broken at least once. Karl was taken aback. He knew Sam was a strict wardenbut Karl had always known him to be a kind man otherwise. Sam had said he had everyone else’s best interests in mind when he locked Dream away, and Karl had thought of Sam as a kind man because of that. But the shattered man before him looked as if he had suffered nothing but torture. Clearly, the crimson had taken Sam too far. 

Karl helped him up, Dream’s knees shaking as he tried to hold up his own weight. Karl led him over to the warden’s chair, where he hesitantly sat. Karl rummaged around his sack, searching for food and drink to give to Dream. There was no use pretending to be on “separate sides” anymore. All they had was each other. 

Karl handed steak and water to Dream, which he eagerly began to eat. As Karl began closing his sack, he heard Dream put the bottle of water down, and he looked up to see the man with his head in his hand, another hand over his mouth.

“Dream?” he asked hesitantly.

“It’s fine,” he replied slowly, “I just… it’s been awhile since I’ve had enough food. I just need to get used to not having an empty stomach anymore. I ate too fast, is all.” 

Karl quietly put a hand on Dream’s shoulder as he dealt with the nausea. Karl knew this feeling all too well; he had spent many days without food, laboring over new solutions to fix the server’s doomsday. The only difference was that Karl had two partners willing to talk him into taking care of himself. Dream had had no one. 

Slowly, Karl led Dream out of the prison lobby, and into the sunlight of the server. Dream covered his eyes, having been in a black prison cell with only lava for light for six months. Karl began to hand him a pair of sunglasses, before jerking his hand back abruptly. These were Eret’s glasses, and they were covered in dried, sticky blood. Eret used to use them to cover his white eyes, only showing their eyes to those he trusted. But more recently, unbeknownst to the other server members, Eret had been covering her crimson red eyes with the glasses. Not many people spoke to Eret, their betrayal of L’manberg from almost a year prior still haunting his legacy, so their possession had flown under the radar for too long. No one had noticed until her crown began growing red vines wrapped around it, the vines digging into Eret’s scalp, infecting his brain and the rest of his body. They had dubbed them the “crimson king” by that point, and the citizens of Old L’manberg had found another reason to avoid Eret. She had been one of the strongest fighters for the crimson in this battle, alongside Bad and Antfrost.

Karl had watched Tubbo tear the crown and vines out of Eret’s head.

Dream hadn’t noticed Karl’s offering of the glasses, so Karl pocketed them and ignored the sick feeling in his stomach. Instead, he was taking in the scenery around them. There were weapons strewn on the ground, but still not as many as there were in the pit their friends lost their lives in. Karl found it fitting that they all died on the grounds of the remains of a city they tried desperately to kill six months prior.

The two men walked quietly in the direction of what used to be L’manberg, Dream leaning heavily on Karl as his legs got used to walking long distances again. As they came upon the pit, Dream froze at the edge while Karl began to climb down into it once more. Karl looked back, and followed his gaze to George, Fundy, Bad, Ant, and Sapnap, who had all died near each other, fighting to protect each other until their last breaths. Dream whispered an _“Oh my god”_ under his breath, before cautiously following Karl down the sides of the cavern.

Normally, when a server member died, their friends carried their body to their home, placing them in their bed for when they would awaken the following day. Only twice before had someone not been placed in their bed, their friends knowing they wouldn’t return. Karl stared at the bodies before him, knowing that not a single one of them would wake in the morning. 

Still, he and Dream silently got to work. One by one, they carried their friends, partners, their kids and their parents out of the crater. Small graves were dug for each of their friends, a sign was placed noting who lay beneath the overturned earth. Karl made sure that Quackity and Sapnap were buried next to each other. 

When they had finished, Karl left Dream kneeling by George and Sapnap’s graves. He ascended the statue he had built of a visitor to the server long ago, its foundations solid enough that it had withstood the test of time. It had taken Karl and Dream long enough to bury their friends that the sun was setting, and Karl could already see monsters making their way out of the shadows. He and Dream would both need to find a shelter, and Karl knew he needed to stay with Dream. For the moment, he would disregard what Dream had done to him and his partners in the past; the two men needed to stick together to survive, and Karl knew Dream was too weak to fend for himself at the moment. 

He jumped down from the statue as the last of the light faded from the sky. He found Dream still kneeling in their makeshift graveyard, and he placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. Dream looked up at him, tears having pooled in his eyes; he stood and followed Karl away from the graveyard, away from their friends. Away from the lives that Karl cost.

  
  


* * *

It had been two days since Karl brought Dream out of the prison. The two men, although they were sharing a makeshift home far from L’manberg, had barely spoken to each other since then. Karl spent his time gathering materials, such as food, ores, and building blocks, in order to keep him alive as long as possible. Karl was on his last life, having lost two in attempts to save his friends from this timeline. 

[His friends would tell you one of his deaths was planned as a way to topple Eret’s throne, but Karl had had higher goals in mind when he took his life. He didn’t care about the monarchy]. 

Dream, Karl had noticed, spent the hours of sunlight walking around the SMP. Karl would often find him standing at an old building, or the plot of land where a building used to be. Eret’s museum, miraculously, had survived the bloodshed of the days prior. Karl thought to himself that it must be the one of the oldest buildings still standing on the server. Dream spent hours walking around the small museum, and when Karl caught sight of him occasionally, he would look away and pretend he couldn’t see the tear tracks on the younger man’s face. 

Karl was giving him space, but he knew Dream wouldn’t take care of himself unless someone did for him. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal in months, and was too distracted by grief to eat or drink. So Karl, the first night of their new lives, had brought Dream a small meal, and sat with him in the remnants of Dream’s first home while they ate. The community house had been destroyed twice, having been painstakingly, and slowly, repaired by Ranboo up until its destruction in the Crimson Wars days prior. Neither Dream nor Karl had the energy to begin repairing it again. As Karl had stood to leave after finishing his meal, he had heard a faint whisper from Dream, a “ _thank you.”_ Karl had smiled at him, hoping that their meal had marked the beginning of an allyship of sorts.

It had, fortunately, as Dream had stayed in Karl’s makeshift shack that night. Karl didn’t sleep, he didn’t think he would have been able to if he tried, but he had sat across from Dream as the young god slowly dozed off and rested well for the first time in months.

[Dream, though he would never admit it, was thankful for the company as well. Sleeping alone meant there was no one to fend off his nightmares with him. While he had had Sapnap, and eventually George for a while, six months of sleeping alone in the prison had taken a toll on him].

Karl spent the second day expanding his shack, which he had supposed he should start calling “home” at some point. It was coming along nicely, actually. Karl had always had an affinity for building instead of fighting, and he had built quite a few things on the server that brought him pride. Things that lay half blown up and ransacked, now. Karl had added a room for Dream and another one for himself, as well as a small dining area and a room for storage. He didn’t figure he or Dream would hold any worldly possessions for a long time, but it was still a comfort to have. Karl was working on the second floor, which would house any pets he and Dream wished to keep, when he realized he was getting hungrier and hungrier. Quickly checking the chests in the house, he noticed the boys had run out of food overnight, neither of them caring enough to notice until almost too late. Whatever, Karl thought, he knew there was a place full of food that had not been touched by the crimson.

Karl made his way over to the abandoned potato farm not far from the L’manberg pit. It had become an unspoken rule of sorts to keep the farm running, and the chests full. Although Karl knew that a few chests had been depleted, there were enough raw potatoes growing for him to carry back to the shack and bake for him and Dream. As Karl finished harvesting, he had half a mind to check the chests near the farm, to weed out any rotten potatoes and try to save any pre-baked potatoes that he could. As he walked over, a piece of fabric laying on the chests caught his eye. Picking it up, he dropped the potatoes in his hands as he realized what he was holding.

It was Quackity’s hat. 

The faint letters “LA D” showed on the front. Quackity had jokingly peeled the “F” off one day after claiming Bad considered the letter to insinuate dirty language.Tommy had said it marked him as “one of the lads.” Karl dropped to his knees, tears filling his eyes, with the hat in his hand. He pulled it to his face; it still smelled of Quackity’s shampoo. 

Karl buried his face into his knees, holding the beanie to his face as well. He sat there for a while, chest heaving as he cried, and cried and cried. He thought he had taken an adequate amount of time to process the loss of his friends, of his partners, but clearly two days hadn’t been long enough. In the back of his mind, he wondered how Dream was handling it, knowing that the last time he saw many of his friends was when they locked him up half a year prior.

A faint rustling sounded near him, and Karl raised his head from his knees, and he jumped at the sight of Quackity, standing across from him, sword in hand. Karl jumped up, stammering over his words as he raced over to his partner. This wasn’t possible, yet here he was, looking as real as ever. 

“Quackity?” Karl asked, his voice quiet with disbelief. Quackity smiled up at him, the skin that had been broken by Technoblade’s pickaxe stretching with his mouth. 

“Hey, Karl,” he said, and Karl just about melted into him. He pulled Quackity into an embrace, and held him there for a long time, just the two of them. Karl didn’t know when he had started crying again, but all of a sudden Quackity was pulling away, and placing his hand on Karl’s face to wipe his tears away.

His hand was ice cold. It didn’t even feel human. Karl jerked away at his touch, and as he turned back to ask Quackity what was going on, the younger man had disappeared.

When was the last time Karl had slept? He knew that a lack of sleep sometimes caused violent hallucinations in this world, and he had spent the past week making dangerous last minute preparations for this war, constantly travelling back and forth between two days ago and the past; honestly, he was surprised he hadn’t completely forgotten himself at this point. He wasn’t sure truly what anchored his mind to the world each time he came back, but he had always had a sneaking suspicion that his anchors were the two men he could crawl into bed with and hold after every travelling event he did. 

Karl shook his head vigorously, trying to clear his mind from what he had just hallucinated. He rubbed his eyes, beanie still in hand, and tried to forget how Quackity’s cold hand had felt on his skin. Even if he wasn’t real, Karl still hadn’t felt a soft touch like that in a while. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could handle being this lonely.

Karl scooped up the potatoes he had dropped and slowly made his way back to the shack. Night had fallen quickly, and Karl had spent an unproductive day crying and farming potatoes. After noticing that none of the lights in the shack were on, Karl turned around slowly, looking to see if he could spot the other man he lived with. Across the way from the house, at the graveyard, a soft light illuminated Dream’s silhouette. He appeared to be viciously flipping through a book while sitting at a grave. Karl wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he would leave the man to his own ways of grieving.

“Dream!” He shouted across the way. He could barely see Dream lifting his head in Karl’s direction, and Karl shouted again, “you should come inside! It’s getting really dark, and that light won’t protect you for very long!”

Dream brushed him off with a short wave of his hand, and Karl sighed before opening the door to his house. After illuminating the torches on the walls, he set down the potatoes in the small furnace he had created, turning it on and fueling it with coal he had scavenged from an abandoned chest on the server. As Karl stood by the furnace, with his hands on the side of it, he realized just how warm the furnace felt, and he placed one of his warmed hands on the side of his face that “Quackity” had touched. 

Karl let out a long breath, sliding down to sit with his back against the side of the furnace, letting its warmth lull him into a much needed state of sleep.

* * *

Karl awoke to being vigorously shaken, and he quickly jerked up to fight whoever was attacking him, only to realize it was just Dream. The man looked worse for the wear, it being evident that he hadn’t rested at all the previous night. Dream had a giddy look on his face, an emotion that Karl hadn’t seen on him in almost a year. 

“Karl! Karl wake up! I’ve got it! I figured it out! I know—I know how to get them back! All of them!” He shouted at Karl. 

Karl sleepily rubbed his eyes, letting his mind adjust to being woken up, and it took a moment before Dream’s words truly registered in his mind.

“What?!” He jumped up to match Dream’s standing position. Dream walked over to their table and placed down a book, the one he had been rifling through the previous night.

“It’s called a ‘server reset,’” he started. “It looks like it’s going to take a lot of effort from me, but I can restore the server back to what it once was. At the very beginning.”

Dream turned to Karl, and caught the confused, blank expression on his face, so he continued. “For the past few weeks, there have been new beings _begging_ to come into the server, but I— and the server — have been subconsciously refusing them entry. I can easily allow them in, but they get… they get confused if they don’t enter a fresh server. So I would ‘reset’ it. I had been looking into this just so we could see the new animals and plants that wanted to come into the server, but the more I researched, the more I realized that this reset would reset people as well. By resetting the server, I can reset the lives of everyone who’s lived on it. I can bring them all back, Karl.”

Karl stared at him in disbelief, mouth slightly open as he tried to process what Dream had told him. Dream inhaled deeply, as if he had forgotten to breathe, and continued speaking. “I was trying to bring them back in another way last night. I did it for Wilbur, but that was just one person. I thought — I thought I had done it with Quackity and Sapnap last night, but I didn’t see them anywhere, and they weren’t on the communicators. I just wanted to—”

“You did it with Quackity.” Karl interjected. “I saw him, last night. But he wasn’t human. He was even worse than Ghostbur was. He was cold and… and just wrong. I thought I had hallucinated him.” 

Dream stared at him with wide eyes, a small victorious smile showing on his face. He turned back to his book, took in a shaky breath, and spoke again. 

“There’s a catch, though, to this server reset. Because they’re all dead currently, none of them would remember what happened in this current dimension. They wouldn’t remember who they became, they wouldn’t even really remember us. We would have to completely rebuild, both the houses and… and our friendships.”

Dream looked at Karl with apprehension, and Karl turned to Dream, already resigned to this idea.

“Do it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve lived hundreds of timelines, all of them spent trying to save my partners, and save my friends. I’ve built countless new relationships with them. This won’t be any different, right? Right?’ Karl turned to Dream for confirmation.

“I… I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never _time travelled_ either. I can just hope that it’ll be easy.”

Karl nods resignedly. 

“Okay…okay. I’m going to need privacy for this, I think. Working with the server takes a lot out of me, and I can’t even imagine what it’s going to do to me if I completely wipe it clean. But Karl, I need you to hear me now.” Dream turned Karl toward him, placing both his hands on either of Karl’s shoulders. “When the server resets, you’re going to feel dead. You’re going to feel like you’re floating around in this endless, hopeless void, and it’s not going to be pretty. Promise me now that you won’t stop trying to return to the overworld until you make it. Promise me you won’t let yourself leave this server,” Dream pleaded with him.

“Of course, absolutely. Why would you ever think I would give up on coming back here?”

Dream shook his head slightly. “I don’t know. I just can’t— I don’t want to be the only one who remembers, in the newer world. I need someone like you to bear this with me, Karl. Please.” 

Karl nodded, and sent Dream on his way to work with the server. Karl took a sitting position in the house, waiting for the ever-familiar weightless feeling that came with death. Karl had died numerous times before, even though only two of them had had an impact on his soul. He wasn’t really sure how that worked, but if he was being honest, he didn’t think anyone else knew how the life count worked on the server either. 

Karl slowly began to lose consciousness, his mind drifting from the shabby living room he had built the previous day. Karl gave in to the swirling in his mind, closed his eyes, and let himself be free.

* * *

He was floating. He wasn’t quite sure where, or when, or who he was, even. But he knew he was floating, because he knew what solid felt like, and this wasn’t it. Slowly, as he became more aware of the pure nothing that surrounded him, he remembered the words of a man who spoke to him not long ago. Something about not giving up on coming back to the world. But which one? When he reached out, he felt dozens of worlds calling his name. He saw an abandoned arena, a stadium, a world inhabited with dozens of boisterous souls, and so many others in his mind. But as he reached out further, something called his name that just felt _right_. A quiet land, completely untouched. Something beckoned him here, and so he let his consciousness be pulled into the land.

He hit a wall. 

Not physically, but his soul hit a wall. Something was preventing him from joining this land. Something whispered in his metaphorical ears that he wasn’t permitted to enter, that the land didn’t truly welcome him here. He was confused, he had felt the pull toward this land not seconds prior. He tried again, and again, and still hit the same wall.

He pulled away from trying to enter this land, and remained in his dark and empty void. He was lonely, he knew that much. He wasn’t quite sure who he missed, though. It was cold, and he knew enough to know what the cold was supposed to feel like. He curled in on himself, lonely, cold, and utterly lost.

A stronger pull beckoned him toward the land that had refused him. It felt as if someone was calling his name from the land. So he tried one more time, bracing for the wall he was bound to hit.

Except, he didn’t hit it. He hit the ground. And rays of sunlight hit him.

A man grabbed his arm and pulled him up, his smile showing beneath the edge of his white painted mask. 

“Karl!” He exclaimed, shaking his arm with excitement. As Karl looked at him, his consciousness came rushing back to his body, years and years of living returning to his mind at once. He collapsed under the weight of his own life rushing at him, and Dream caught him on the way down.

“Yeah yeah, I figured that would happen. It took a second for your mind and body to catch up to each other,” Dream said.

Karl stood back up, a new yet familiar heaviness in his heart that he hadn’t missed seconds ago. “I couldn’t get in,” he said. “The server wouldn’t let me in.” Karl felt a drop in his stomach.. If he wasn’t let in, would the others come? Would they still feel the same pull Karl felt, and would they even listen to it? 

Dream shook his head humorously. “The server is picky, a lot of times. It has to agree with me on whose soul it lets in and whose it doesn’t. Helps give me peace of mind a lot of times. You remember when I told the server Schlatt was no longer welcome? It assumed you weren’t welcome anymore, but I have the ultimate say at the end of the day. It just took a moment for the land to agree with me.”

Karl breathed a sigh of relief, and turned to look at the fresh land before him. Karl had wandered into this server after it had become very developed, and he hadn’t experienced the barren land like this before. It was beautiful. As he turned to tell this to Dream, his expression fell at the sight of the man beside him.

“The mask again, really? You’re going to keep going down that path?”

“To be known is to be loved, and love is a distraction, Karl,” Dream said curtly.

“A distraction?!” he shouted. “From what? What duties do you hold over this server anymore, Dream? You could be whoever you wanted to. You could just be the peaceful village man who fishes all day and sleeps all night, or you could be a local librarian, or you could build houses for people, or you could—”

Dream cut him off. “Some things are always meant to be, Karl. Fate is not a force easily ignored in this land. If my role was determined before my time, so be it. I’ll be the villain in their stories if they want me to.”

“There doesn’t _need_ to be a villain anymore! Isn’t the whole point of this reset to make sure that — that doomsday doesn’t happen again?”

“It’s not smart to tempt fate, Karl.”

He thought back to Technoblade and Acrisius once more. The man who fought fate and suffered anyways. Karl opened his mouth to retaliate, but was taken back by surprise as another soul entered the world. It was two of them, actually. Alyssa and Callahan.

[Dream hurriedly explained afterwards that some familial and platonic bonds were unbreakable, like that of Alyssa and Callahan, carried through time and through other lands. He reassured Karl that he would reforge his bond with Quackity and Sapnap very easily. Dream had said that in due time, the souls that bonded with his would return to him. Karl didn’t miss how he had looked at George and Sapnap, two new arrivals, when he said that].

Soon, they started arriving in droves. As Karl and Dream pulled more souls into the world, the older ones greeted each other as if they had known each other for years. Bad and Skeppy immediately began joking around with each other, Tommy and Tubbo were running around, Tommy having already found materials to craft two sticks — one for either hand— and Techno, Wilbur, and Philza stood having a calm conversation about a realm they must have previously inhabited. Lots of politics talk, from what Karl could hear.

Karl noticed that Dream was already being referred to as a god, or “the admin” as many older souls called it. But he also noticed that he was being referred to the same. A god. The idea sent shivers down Karl’s back.

After just about everyone had “spawned in” as Dream called it, Dream and Karl trekked up to a familiar hill nearby. Dream told Karl on the walk there that he wanted to talk more to George and Sapnap, since he could tell that their souls already knew each other’s. Karl had said it was a great idea, but he could tell Dream was apprehensive about opening communication back up.

“You guys are old friends,” he said, “they haven’t just forgotten you. It’s a fresh start, too. A chance to keep them close.”

Dream had fallen silent after that, and the two men stood quietly overlooking a barren lake. Karl noticed a few axolotls swimming in it, and noted that they must have been one of the animals that Dream said had been itching to inhabit this land. Dream muttered something next to Karl. He turned to the quiet man with an eyebrow raised. 

“We could build a house. Out there. In the- the… in the middle of the lake. I think that’d be nice.”

Karl nodded in gentle agreement. 

“I think that a house would look great there. Only, what would you build it out of?”

He saw Dream crack a smile under his mask at that joke, and the two men laughed darkly at themselves. 

He left Dream standing on the hill as he turned to speak to the members of the server. Karl had to remind himself that these people didn’t know who he was, since he was a stranger to all of them when the server had first called his name almost a year prior. As he told them about what land they would be allowed to reside in, Tommy jumped into the conversation.

“So you’re a god then, like that Dream fella? He’s a bit weird, innit? With that mask and all, just makes him seem like _Oooh I’m Dream and I’ll never show my face because I’m quirky and creepy”_

Karl smiled at Tommy’s antics, and began explaining that he didn’t possess the powers Dream did, but that he simply was close to Dream, and was here when he created the land. It was a white lie, but it got Karl out of explaining how he arrived so early.

As Karl continued speaking about Dream, he turned to gesture toward him at the bottom of the hill, but faltered when he saw the man standing ankle-deep in the lake, staring down at the water below him.

“Dream?” he called out. The younger man turned to look at him, a crazed smile showing at the bottom of his mask. He placed a crafting table in the water in front of him, then climbed onto it. Karl noticed him start shaking, and soon Dream’s hysterical laughter reached his and the crowd’s ears. No one but Karl understood the joke yet, which pulled his heart down from the high it was on. The crowd dissipated as Dream’s laughter continued to ring through the server, but as Karl waded over toward Dream’s position in the lake, his laughter had died and was replaced with violent cries. Dream’s body shook as he curled into himself, sitting on the crafting table he had placed. Karl sat beside him, a hand on his shoulder, as Dream let the events of the past week finally settle in his mind. Karl waved away concerned bystanders who inquired after Dream’s wellbeing, noting to himself to make up a believable story about a “bad experience” on a previous server. Karl would shield them from the truth, for now.

By the time Dream’s breathing had steadied, night had begun to fall, and small houses were being built close to the spawning area, shelter to protect them from the monsters that rose at night. Karl led Dream out of the lake, leaving the single table to be built upon and added to in the morning, and he slowly helped Dream gather the materials to make a small house of his own. Karl would sleep somewhere else for the night, but it had been so long since Dream had needed to fend for himself that Karl doubted he remembered how. 

His house wasn’t much, just an assembly of dirt and cobblestone that would last Dream the night. Karl had helped him shift his bed into place, and was turning to go when Dream grabbed both of his wrists.

“Karl, I’m… I’m scared. You’ve seen firsthand what happens when you try to change fate. What if I’m supposed to be the bad guy? What if I’m fated to always be the villain?”

Karl paused to think for a moment, Dream’s questioning of fate making him question his own; but he wouldn’t let a broken kid try to change his mind.

“I tried for hundreds of lifetimes to change what would happen to my friends, and now I’m here. You can keep living your sad, villainy life all you want, but I know damn well I’m not going to listen to whatever ‘fate’ has to say to me.”

With that, Karl turned to leave. Acrisius whispered faintly in his mind, but Karl pushed him out. Karl didn’t think anything on this server was _fated_ to happen, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let a prophecy of sorts govern his actions on day one.

* * *

Karl awoke to the sounds of the kids on the server chasing each other around the perimeter of the lake. Most everyone had built their overnight homes around the lake, as a way of staying close to each other. As Karl began to walk over to Niki’s house to meet her (again), he noticed something starkly contrasted to the lake floating in the water. Stepping closer, his eyes widened as he realized what was floating, forgotten in the lake.

A white mask, painted with a black smiley face.

**Author's Note:**

> this is going to be part of a series i base around the idea of a server reset! also give me kudos and comments they fuel me oooh u wanna hit the kudos button so bad /lh


End file.
